The Pendragon Legend by Antal Szerb Read Free Book Online Page A

afraid that the lady would keep aloof from this popular event. We were out celebrating, not far from the hotel, and had befriended all the showgirls and coloured people, when suddenly we caught sight of her tall figure.
    In a flash, Cristofoli forced his way through the protesting crowd to present himself before her and, in the heat of the moment, offered her the first thing that came to hand—a cheap toy trumpet .
    “Thank you,” she said, with a smile, and miraculously vanished , like a rabbit from a conjuror’s hat. Cristofoli ripped off his necktie and tore it to shreds.
    His only hope now was to rescue her from some major conflagration , carrying her out of the flames in his mighty arms.
    Then one day she was no longer alone. There was a man at her table, a hideously degenerate-looking man with a distinctly green complexion. He spoke in a low, rapid voice while she listened with a look of exasperation. Cristofoli was beside himself, and calmed down only when he learnt from the head waiter that the man was her doctor. Eileen St Claire and the doctor then spent the afternoon in her suite of rooms.
    “Of course it’s a medical examination,” I told my unhappy friend, in an attempt to cheer him up.
    That night the surprising and inexplicable denouement took place. First, the doctor left on the evening train. What happened next I have had to put together from the few incoherent words Cristofoli let fall.
    He had left the ballroom at around eleven and was on his way up to the room when he met her in the corridor. He stopped in his tracks and just stared at her in silence. In silence, she took him by the hand and led him to her suite.
    I was woken, at five a.m., by his return. His face was glowing with an unearthly happiness and he was quite incapable of conversation . He simply declaimed poetry and wept. I told him to take a sedative and let me get back to sleep.
    In the morning he dressed as fastidiously as a young girl for her first ball. I had been ready half an hour earlier, and by the time he came down for breakfast I had already heard the dreadful news and was at my wits end how to break it to him. In the end, I had to tell him: Eileen St Claire had left earlier that morning.
    We set off at once for Paris. We went to the police, to detective agencies, everywhere. All efforts to trace her were in vain.
    Then Cristofoli’s delicate nerves gave way. I was forced to take him to a sanatorium, where they nursed him for three weeks. Even after his recovery, he was never quite right again. He broke off relations with me, but also with poetry and archaeology. I lost all contact with him, and for many years thought he had committed suicide. Only recently however someone mentioned that they had seen him in Persia, where he was now Minister for Air Transport in the revolutionary government.
    And now here was I, sitting face to face with the same woman. I could hardly feel neutral towards her, and briefly considered whether I should mention that I already knew who she was. But in the end it seemed wiser to say nothing.
    We got into the car, Maloney in the driving seat and the two of us in the back. The memory of Cristofoli served only to deepen the mystery that seemed to surround her like a birthright.
    There was little conversation, and its tone was somehow rather distant, without genuine interest. At last the topic that Maloney had mentioned cropped up, and she expounded her views on the similarities between the Hungarians and the Irish.
    “Both nations spent hundreds of years under the oppressive ‘protection’ of a more powerful neighbour. Both showed real greatness when they had to fight against tyranny, and somehow both fell into confusion and lost their way the moment they won their independence.”
    She then spoke of the blighted centuries endured by the Irish, their national martyrs, and Kathleen-ni-Hoolihan, the immortalhag who, in her own ghostly way, symbolised the ghost-haunted land of Ireland.
    She described